Tag: “Of Human Bondage” – Somerset Maugham

it’s become evident that Shostakovich’s symphonies require context, a backstory, it’s otherwise like listening to a film scorewithout the movie, though often even pleasant, it lacks the poignancy that a story would deliver to the music accompanying it

but for specifically political reasons, the symphonies of Shostakovich, apart from a few exceptions, the Fifth, the Eighth, though only somewhat that one, for instance, without the accompanying history, don’t hold, the emotional connection is too abstruse, foreign, to catch

the Ninth was written in 1945, WorldWar ll had been won, by the Soviet Union as well as the Western Allies

Stalin was still in command, Russians were returning to their oppressive, indeed murderous, regime

Shostakovich had been expected to bring glory to the Soviet system, he delivered instead a joke, in musicalterms, a scherzo, if you can listen to the language, a wry joke, instead of a paean to the glory of Stalin, hedelivered not at all a full on hour-longspecial as he’d been doing before,but a short, his shortest, symphony, full of exaggerated, which is to say,hypocritical, fanfare

piccolos and flutes cheer, mimickingflags and banners, trombones boast an only uncertain victory, deflating even, in the third movement decisively, though, I found, prolongedly, with winds sounding exhausted, but not succumbing to standing down, while violins portray the population in a frenzy, their military industrial complexhaving whipped them into feverish servitude

Stalin was not amused, the piece was banned until after the autocrat’s demise, for its “ideological weakness”

nor was the world then, for that matter,impressed, who thought the Sovietsuperstar’s response to victory was unusually trivial

but Shostakovich had been unable to applaud the tyrant, a politically required duty, if not even officiallycommissioned, he could only put up surreptitiously a pantomime, if he was to remain true to his principles

which he did

his work was a call to arms for the beleaguered denizens of his oppressed society, spoken in alocally decipherable musical code

though I had the good fortune to learn to read and write music as a boy, play music, learn about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, it didn’t take anyone else much more thantheir enthusiasm to see what the Beatleswere similarly doing, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, they were not only singing, but making history, shaping it, and us, we followed the questions they rose, their responses, the effects upon ourselvesfor nothing is considered until it’s mentioned, spoken, made clear, and theywere those prophets

the same goes for art, we see as we seecause Monet, Picasso, Warhol showed us how to see, what to look at